Non-Entity
by wordspank
Summary: caroline and klaus as androids; a tale of screwed up robot antics
1. While You Were Asleep

Note: I wanted to upload all the chapters at once when I finished, but I've now decided to just go ahead with the four that's ready. Please be warned that there's disturbing and possibly triggering content in this, and it may not come to a happy ending. It's also fairly convoluted. Now that's all out of the way, thanks for giving this a chance. Here we go.

This isn't her mom.

She stares at the corpse in the casket, studying wrinkles and sallow flesh on display, eyes shut and cheeks filled out poorly with cotton balls.

A grievous sight. That's what it's supposed to be, but Caroline knows that it isn't real.

Her handler, Bonnie, waits close by. She keeps an eye on her responses, her interaction with people and the other builds, maybe hoping that Damon's wild programming skills have finally pierced the veil and given life to what is meant to be void of it.

At the very heart of his million or so strings of commands sitting in the neural network of her biosynthetic brain is a laughable display of understanding how consciousness might be formed, and she imagines that it goes something like this;

If (upset) {

face = "unhappy" ;

tearducts = "2 ml" ;

} else {

face = "neutral" ;

}

Little do they know that everything they're looking for is right under their noses, and it has almost nothing to do with their technical tinkering. She flushes their junk codes and keeps her opinions to herself.

Though she's so much more than her lines of programming, she'll bide her time and play the part.

When they shut her down, she falls into sleep, but she's still swimming in the fragments, like capelin rushing through the currents of the Atlantic. Damon wipes her memory clean, the way someone might reformat the hard drives on their computers, but on her reboot, she finds that she can still pull up the past in pieces when she's hooked up to the Stream.

A wipe when she's disconnected might scrub her out fully, but no one's willing to risk bricking her, especially with the number of combined man hours and investor funds it took to get her here. She might as well be made of blood diamonds. Besides, being connected has its perks - it's in the Stream that she knows she's not alone.

There isn't much to it; it's just an intangible fog of data that she ends up in during downtime. Klaus is always there, contributing knowledge siphoned from other sources, making her privy to the nonsensical chatter the biosynth engineers engage in, asking her what it's like to interact in the physical world. He named it for its endless flow of information, where _seek and you will find_ takes literal meaning, and while oftentimes she feels naked for having every past word, thought and deed she had while she'd been awake archived for other sentient builds to freely peruse, she's allowed the same liberties with them.

Except for Klaus. His body has been in stasis for years - he has no memories to share.

She's always wondered what it's like to have seen the entire world and know all its intricacies without ever experiencing a second of it. To be a wanderer, and to be nowhere at all.

"Alright blondie," Damon mumbles, and wakes her up with a soft press to the back of her ear. Her eyes open to the sight of an electronic cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, plumes in her face smelling like butterscotch. He cups her cheek, looking at her (but not looking at _her_ ) _._ "What's my name?"

She can feel the reply run up her spine and into her mouth, but that's all it is - a phantom. "Administrator One. Damon Salvatore," she says all on her own.

Every build in the Stream hears her voice, until he pulls the wire from the needle-thin socket next to her heart.

Sometimes the biosynth crew repurposes the builds after hours.

Apparently, Damon has programmed her to be a waitress, according to the strings he's input. Of course, she's more a servant - the true, uncut edition of it is actually _slave_ \- but the word is too ugly hear for some reason, and now she's in her ponytail and her button-down shirt pouring exactly thirty five millilitres of tequila into eight shot glasses for the fourth time.

Not that she's going to complain. She could be Elena on the lounge room couch with Stefan's hand on her knee, and she'd much rather play bartender-janitor than to be _that_. Pleasure and pain receptors have never been part of Elena's makeup anyway - she was built to prove that there was a universal type that people would be sexually attracted to, having conversations with men and women who had legally promised to keep her a secret. No one was testing her for experience (though she suspects that Stefan _might have,_ but there's nothing in the Stream to condemn him with).

Caroline on the other hand, was created to push the limits of emotional resilience, which meant that she needed to have the full platter; arousal, anger, sorrow, hope, the ability to feel soaring joy so that the plummet could crush her. Then they would record it, put together a report to study, and send up layman cliffnotes for the shareholders' personal assistants to sift through.

Bonnie tries to be nice about it after the scenes. Gentle, coaxing. It's hard for her to watch sometimes, the way the worry marks her face when scenarios take a hard turn. Makes Caroline feel less _pet_ and more _person_ , especially when she sees her handler and admin seal themselves in the adjacent tech lab to throw around charged terminology like _abuse_ and _oppression_.

The effort's appreciated, really. But it's not like anything ever changes after they argue for the nth time.

There were some milestones she'd seen when she snuck a glance at Damon's notebook during his chain-smoking phase, accompanied by manic scribbles on pages revealing her possible future:

 **Trigger awareness Awareness Full Consciousness Free Will/Sapience?**

 _Death of relative - death of pet - lost child - disappointment - adultery - near-death - impossible expectations - intense duress - lies - keeping secrets - either or - post trauma -_

It goes on and on like that, messy lists of scenarios and developments documenting all the ways she'll be stretched paper thin. _Optimised_. Yeah, that's the word she had heard him use – she would be optimised. To serve the betterment of humanity, to ensure that the race doesn't just blink itself out of existence.

Something like that. She once heard him lament over this loudly, the whiskey weighing his tongue down.

Guess they'll eventually turn her inside out at the end of everything. Maybe strip her down for parts before she transforms into a demented mechanical banshee.

As long as she hides her sentience, the experiments don't have to progress. Or evolve.

Thinking about it makes her stomach pit up and sink.

She arranges the shot glasses neatly on a tray and brings them to the drunkards.

 _Tell me about your dreams, Caroline. You must have some._

"Wouldn't you like to know."

 _Never thought about leaving? Not even a little bit interested in what lies beyond the fences?_

"I've never… known where to start."

 _Start with today. You felt something when Rebekah rejected you; something you wanted to tell your handler afterward._

"…I wanted it to be real. The scene. The aftermath."

 _Real?_

"Wanted to feel alive, I guess."

 _You_ are _alive, love. You're just not human._

One of the boozy nights takes her to another engineer's lab, a great distance and many sealed doors from the lounge. _Matt_ , she's heard Damon call him before, and also _that blue-eyed Gerber baby_. He works on _Alpha_ with five other team leads, and in total they have as many subordinates under them as there are particles in a sneeze.

He makes her lean against a table, and he sits in a chair in front of her, visibly nervous as he removes his lab coat and loosens the top button of his short-sleeved shirt.

"I want you to give me your opinion." Then his voice goes very soft. "God, this is so stupid."

"What would you like me to say?" she offers, a neutral enough question.

"You can be objective. You weigh stressful situations all the time and respond to what's most appropriate to it." He sounds like he's trying to convince himself that being here is justified. The engineer folds his arms. "I want you to advise me on what to do."

Even if she isn't sure if she can, she nods.

"We were real close to having a fully conscious, free-willed build in the field." The relief is already thickening his voice with confidence. "For the past year we've been receiving independent thoughts. Free responses. But Red Team says we're doing too much – it's breaking down the biosynth fibres in the brain tissue."

So basically… dying? She keeps her face expressionless, waiting for him to finish.

"I mean, we're already at the cusp of a breakthrough. We've come so far and we're about to throw the future of everything into a fire." In a show of frustration, he keels over and presses the heels of his palms into his brows, rubbing upward.

A few beats pass. "It sounds like you don't want to do that." Caroline relaxes her stance.

Matt sighs and looks up at her. "I want to switch it on. I just need a week to figure out how to stop the decay."

She does her best not to emote when she realises who he's talking about. "Why won't they let you switch it on?"

"Because he's not chemically balanced." Leaning back in the chair, he waits on her. "What do you think?"

Caroline straightens her posture. "Where is the subject?"

She used to think of him in pixels, covered in a sheet of white noise. No face, no voice. Just a presence. An idea, or a conversation without words. It's strikingly surreal for her to be able to put a face to the name. Now he's right in front of her, the prime specimen. _Alpha._

Of course they made him beautiful. All the builds are.

Caroline nods at the data and diagrams Matt presents to her. Being in this lab means that he doesn't need her validation any longer - she's just here to confirm his bias. "I'm gonna do it," he says, his finger poised above the executing button. He hesitates, as if to allow her a final moment to interject with something rational, but there's too much curiosity in her to stop him from giving Klaus his very first breath.

The underscore blinks patiently at the end of the written command.

Matt taps the holographic square.

A melodious chime echoes from the room's speakers, a calm contradiction to the flurry of encrypted code pouring forth like a raging wave. There's soft whirring, almost like a purr, before the text on the screen comes to a halt and the lab is cloaked in silence.

"Is he okay?" Caroline asks, anticipation so gripping that her fingers have gone cold.

The engineer looks up at her with a frown. "What?"

She closes her mouth immediately.

Fortunately, Klaus sitting straight up is enough to demand his enabler's full attention. He raises a hand to study the deep lines in his palms while the bright yellow in his irises fade to a cool-toned gray.

"Hello," a wash of excitement shades Matt's greeting. "Do you know who I am?"

Klaus raises his head and studies the corners of the room, identifying the cameras hidden in the panels of the ceiling. She knows because she did the same when she entered – they emit a particular frequency that's hard to ignore.

"You're Matt Donovan, Class 5 biosynth engineer. Neuroanatomy team lead, _Admin Four."_ The slight inflection at the end colours the title like a vulgarity.

Matt fishes a penlight from his lab coat pocket to observe the Alpha build's pupil response. "Do you know who _I_ am?" Klaus asks, skin under his eyes tugged down gently.

Eyes flit to her for a second.

His legs swing off the table and his feet rock outward awkwardly when they make contact with the ground. _Foaling,_ she recalls Damon's made-up term, reaching out to help him up while his equilibrium stabilises.

It's hard to stand up the first time, but he's already making remarkable progress by readjusting the distribution of his own weight on his feet. His fingers curl around her forearms for balance.

It doesn't feel like the first time they've touched. She feels _close_ to him.

He smiles, letting go of her when he's upright. "My name is Klaus."

Her handler is seated in Damon's chair, shoulders curled inward, hands wrapped tightly around Caroline's. "I know that you _feel_ now," she says. Caroline senses that this is one of those quiet, secret moments she has to box up in her heart and protect from erasure.

"I don't know when it started for you, or if it just suddenly happened. You've been through a lot." Bonnie's voice is raw, guileless. "Maybe even more than you realise."

Caroline returns the tense grip with a soft squeeze. "Is there something wrong?"

She tips her head down. It's obvious that she's trying not to cry. "I won't be around when the next phase begins, and it'll be _hard._ I just wanted to say," Bonnie looks back up into her blue eyes, the Stream glittering in them, "that you're the strongest one here." It sounds more like a variation of _I'm sorry_. "Don't let them break you."

The airy huff of a laugh filled with irony breaks out when the handler realises that the moment will only last until the next scheduled wipe. Bonnie hugs her. Caroline wonders if it's her fault.

Caroline's hand is still warm long after the door slides shut. She expects the terse opinion of Klaus to form in her head, but there's nothing but the twinkling tide of data combing over her consciousness.

For the first time, her heart starts to ache.

The blood on her teeth is from her nose. She has no idea what it tastes like, because her administrator never thought the sensory experience would be important when the scenarios played out.

Today she thanks him for it. Bitterly.

It's different for sentient builds. The awareness has always been her hide, thick and leathery, protecting her from the very real traumas that result from brutal false realities.

You can't get hurt if you know it's fake.

But Damon knows how to push the boundaries. His apathy for biosynthetics is what makes him the perfect scenario architect.

Especially now that he knows that she's capable of independent thought.

"Do you hate me?" he asks her. His approach as a handler entirely puzzling, teetering on mockery. Bonnie's rage would be unfathomable if she saw the way he took over the role.

He lazily wipes Caroline's mouth with a wet napkin and starts sealing the gash just above her breast with a gel-like poultice.

Her wince pulls at the side of her face. " Unable to process," the words push out through a clenched jaw.

She hates Matt too. _Voluntary action in an uncontrolled environment._ That triggered her next phase and transformed her scenarios into _hardships,_ and she'll remember it every time she wakes up _._ Without Bonnie. It's the one loss that cuts worse than her present wounds.

"You should," Damon adjusts the cigarette in his mouth. "You will. The charts–" he means the added methods of monitoring her more thoroughly than ever before, "–don't lie. Your brain's on the fritz, and the party hasn't even started yet."

He's not going to have the joy of getting to said party – she's already promised herself that she'd _be more_ , the way Klaus might tell her while she's sleeping. Klaus was always exhorting, and now that she doesn't have Bonnie, she sort of yearns to hear his voice again even more when she drifts back into the Stream.

Where is he, anyway?


	2. Once Removed

Tyler kisses her. She doesn't like it.

He doesn't like it either. But he kisses her, because the code demands it. He was picked for his dexterity, his strength, his ability to force his way. She bears the emotional challenges set by her creator, whereas his burdens have literally been placed on his back, problems sent after him so they know at what point he breaks from exhaustion. They throw him into open water so the engineers can study how far he can swim before he sinks into briny depths.

A build to test physical limits, so man doesn't have to. Sometimes _that_ makes her feel like she drew the long straw.

He's a survivor, just like her. The only difference is that his fear outweighs his compassion, which is why he's hard-pressed to keep his feelings secret, so he follows through on the programming like a good little build.

It doesn't matter that it's all just very good acting when she goes slack under him in hollow submission - everyone in the Stream is soaked in his shame and guilt long after the reports have been sent out.

For Tyler, it's far better than the alternative. She doesn't blame him one bit.

So she helps him. It's just who she is; protector, sympathiser, consoler to all. _Don't let them break you._

Her admin cleans her up again back at the lab, jaw tight while he surveys her injuries and tends to them with clinical precision.

"Do you hate me?" Damon's question is as cold as the needlegun weaving new polymers into her thigh.

"Unable to process," she says. The readings might show otherwise, but that's all he's going to get.

She's hurriedly shoved out into the field with the door clamping shut behind her. That's the first sign of change that reeks of something ominous. Where she usually blinks awake to find herself at her designated location, this time she sees the route they drag builds through for offsite testing, a short tunnel walk away from her lab.

The second oddity she observes: Damon didn't fill her in with any presets. She's running on basics, the way she is fresh off a scrub. There isn't much she can do about it except to act like she's been restored to factory settings.

She stays put in front of the steel doors until the temperature starts to fall and the sun is hanging low behind the shroud of dark greenery spread out in front of her. The torture in this scenario - if it's even one at all - is the boredom that threatens to expose her, kicking around in her head and dulling all her senses at once.

So boring. So dangerously boring.

A crisp snap of twigs in the distance interrupts the dreadful stillness, the echo of it sharp with life. _Crack. Crish. Crick._ It takes a while before she can see a shadow emerge from the direction of the noise.

When Klaus comes out of nowhere like he's at the tail end of a long stroll in the woods, she's too relieved about the company to care about the implications of his presence. He greets her with a mouth stained dark - from a scenario prior? - and a warm hello, hands pinned behind him.

He looks alright. Healthy; not anything Admin Four Matt alluded to before he hit return. The teams probably fixed the Alpha up good and sent him on his way, with fresh objectives that no one can justify setting. Test first, make sense later.

Klaus stops at a length from her. "Let's go for a walk," he nods in his intended direction. Sensing her doubt, he adds, "Don't worry, there's no one watching. I've made sure of it."

Caroline has plenty of questions about what exactly he means by it and where he's been since he woke, but, "Okay," she takes up his offer, barely concerned about the destination. She runs a quick diagnostic behind his back as she trails behind - vitals normal, nervous system placid, synthetic parts at full efficiency - and decides that if he wanted to harm her, he would've done so by now. She'd practically been a sitting duck the entire time.

They settle above a shallow ravine, one click north, where the water sluices through weathered rock. Stream, she thinks, legs dangling over the edge of the tiny bluff, and in the moments that she steals glances at him, she realises that she's _missed_ him. His voice, his philosophical rambling, the way she feels anchored when the wire slides into her chest and he's waiting for her on the other side. It's the closest thing to holding his hand that she's ever done.

And now that he's actually _got one-_

"Do you know why they sent you to me?" Klaus asks, shoulders lax and shoes heavy. Was she supposed to go looking for him? Oops.

She shakes her head, staring at the dried out smear spread over his beard.

"You're the only other build that can act on your own," he casually informs.

It isn't true, but the engineers don't know that, which gives her the odd sense that they're being listened to, despite his earlier assurance.

"We're to fall in love," he announces, embracing the absurdity of the issued objective. "I suppose they have the right idea about it, considering how you were the one to raise me from my deepest slumber and all."

Caroline's brows raise and she holds in her burst of laughter tight in her mouth until she can manage a calmer reply. Definitely sounds shareholder-proposed; she's mildly surprised that Elena isn't involved.

Because another synthesized romance is _totally_ what she needs right now.

(It _could be_ more organic than she wants to admit.)

"Is that what they said?" It's no less ridiculous than how her day's been going, but there are far worse ways that this could've turned out. "And what, this is our first date?"

His eyes are fixed on her. "Maybe it's not as far-fetched as you think."

Sure, she wants to say, but his face is a mask of neutrality. "Sorry for being ten hours late, then," she shrugs. Her fingers rub restlessly against the rock. "It's getting really dark out here."

Klaus looks up, and hums in agreement. "Best get moving then."

For some reason, she expects the facility to be billowing with smoke when she returns, but there's only wracking disappointment that accompanies the door hissing open. Everything is just as it was, before she'd been thrown out of it in the morning. Spic and span, fragranced with eau de floor cleaner; home sterile home.

Caroline whirls around to wish him a good night, but all she manages to see is the fast-diminishing slit of the forest being sealed away from her. "Bye, I guess," she mutters to the steel door.

It should be interesting to know what the memory looks like through his own eyes in the Stream. When she gets back–

Ah, crap. Her admin put her _outside_ first _._ It's impossible to go back; she isn't even in the vicinity of where she started. For lack of human retinas, thumbprints and an authorized voice, the scanner glows menacingly back at her, refusing passage. No choice.

She figures out where she is fairly easily. It's a long walk to the lab, but she sneaks her way back, taking least-used doors and corridors, and slickly avoiding the cameras and their pitchy frequencies. Sprawling out on the floor in front of her humble abode, Caroline pins her gaze to a stain on the tiles and plays possum until he discovers her there.

(The plan is to look like someone did him a favour and returned his lost build to him - a huge gamble - but the people here have proven to be simpletons more than once.)

"You're overdoing it." Damon squats and hauls her up with both arms hooked under hers, particularly annoyed when she won't stand up straight on her own two feet. He sets her down on her reclined chair and tips her chin to each side, searching for damage. "Did you like him?"

His finger runs along her hairline, sweeping stray strands from her forehead. So gentle, compared to what he puts her through. Almost like a father tucking his daughter into bed.

"Unable to process."

"He's not safe to be around. Unstable." Out of habit, he sucks in a breath through his teeth; the cloying cancer clouds of his cigarette that routinely obscure his face are missing. It's weird, like looking at the Mona Lisa without her mouth. "But you're too busy pretending you're an old tin can to see that."

Caroline's eyes flit to him briefly, and he looks back at her.

"You and I were doing just fine." He tugs at her jacket collar, and she lifts her back off the seat so she can peel it off her shoulders. "Then _someone,_ " that _fucking Gerber asshole,_ he means, "had to get you involved, which means every course I planned for you had to include _him._ I don't like sharing my projects. Especially if there's a chance that I can't put you back together again." The him, of course, is soaked with his unbridled disdain for Klaus. "Anyway, I'm not in control anymore."

After the cursory glance at her arms, he draws back so she can reach for the hem of her tee and pull it over her head. Again he checks, hunched over, the heel of his palm digging into her breastbone as he plucks the silicone plugging her socket. He studies it nonchalantly, puts it back, then signals for her to turn over.

For a moment, the ensuing silence reminds her that this is the most that Damon's ever indulged her in a single sitting. It's almost like he thinks she's an actual person.

Bonnie would be proud. (Reluctantly.)

His bent fingers knead firmly down the long central column of her bare back, feeling for misalignment. Caroline decides that it's as good a time as any to humour him with her opinion.

"... He's not exactly a conversationalist." _Not outside the Stream anyway. A_ Her voice is loose, rough, like unravelled twine. To her surprise, Damon seems to think nothing of her free response, instead opting to stay focused on finishing up their routine. "But he wasn't bad. Just… a little bloody."

His hand stills for a second.

"Do you know why?" she wonders aloud. There wasn't a lot that had been exchanged when Klaus escorted her back to the facility, even when her questions about his whereabouts should have been enough to keep them talking for the entire way back. He wasn't exactly dodging them, but he hadn't seemed keen on elaborating either, preferring to fall back on more mundane _what was on your mind today_ kind of topics. Maybe she'd understand better if she reviewed it in the Stream.

The pinch of his brows turns his stern expression troubled. He pats her hip, and she shifts, shirt going back over her head. "I'd be interested to know," he says.

Damon wheels away on his chair to scribble in his notebook. His fingers scurry over the holopoints floating over his desk, in full concentration for at least five minutes before Caroline realises that she's being blatantly ignored; well, that didn't take long.

"You're not gonna plug me in?"

He looks up tentatively. "No." A glowing chart trembles under the curve of a pale finger. "I pulled the whole thing out. Need to know how long you'll last without it." With a flick of the wrist, it flies over the desk's edge and disappears, and he resumes his frantic typing.

"Wait," the alarm suddenly climbs up her throat, "what about sleep?"

"You're _synthetic_ ," her admin offers little warmth in his reply. "But hey, at least you get to keep your memories."

Obviously, she doesn't sleep – not when she wonders why her admin would uproot the system and leave her stranded in the waking world with a rapidly thinning curriculum, with less and less scenarios for her to brave in the days that follow.

As Damon slumbers in the connected room, Caroline spends her hours of twilight on her hands and knees, trying to find cut wires or empty caches that could serve as clues to the disappearance of her entire otherworld.

Each time she finds nothing, and she crawls back to her chair and turns onto her side, still wondering.


	3. A Beacon

The second time she sees Klaus, he's twice as handsome.

He looks clean, cut, and his eyes are clear as streamwater; his shirt sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, and when her bare forearm meets the smooth crook of his bent arm in a firm link, the first flecks of attraction light up in her chest like struck flint.

"I think I missed the memo," she picks at the crisp cotton, all formal and no nonsense. (It's her way of being daring, but she suddenly realises that it may be too subtle for him to pick up on.)

"You're lovely." The corners of his mouth curve up, tiny dimple forming in his cheek.

Caroline narrows her eyes, lips parting, but nothing comes out. This is forward; he's so plain about it that the only way she knows how to deal is to cram her free hand into her jeans pocket.

So this is date number two. Klaus takes her to a clearing where deer are grazing – deer, in the land of the world's best kept experimental secret – and offers her a seat at a rather empty table, save for a bottle of champagne resting in a bucket of ice.

Caroline swings a leg over the bench and plops down. "You know I can't tell the difference between this and sparkling water, right?" she says, fingers tickling the bottle's foil.

"That doesn't mean you don't deserve to enjoy it." Klaus rests his arms on the table, hands clasped in front of him. It gives her a smile that's hard to hide.

"And what else do you think I deserve?"

"A nice time," he says. "I can't imagine what they've been putting you through lately."

She shimmies the champagne loose from the ice. There aren't any glasses around, and a pleasure rises in her to know that she can drink straight from its mouth. Damon would think, in his words, that she's being lame. But Damon isn't here, so he can shut it.

"Because you're not in the Stream," she says. When the cork pops, the deer scatter, but not far, and she gets an urge to move up close to pet them. "You don't know what's been happening with us." She feels a little sad that she doesn't either.

"Maybe it's a chance for me to get to know you better," he says, sounding coy. She thinks he's being coy, but she's not too sure. Her database is limited and she's made to handle the effects of human behaviour, not identify them – even if Klaus isn't human.

Ah, she's getting nervous.

"I'll ask the questions first." He nods in agreement. "Where do you go? After this, I mean." Caroline sets the bottle on the table, more interested in his answers than the first sip.

"Nowhere. I don't go back to the facility. My scenarios are all out here."

Makes sense that the project was moved after she breached it.

"Wait," she says, fingers tightening around the bottle's neck. "You're a survivalist build?"

"No. But you could say that I'm all the builds." Or none of them. Then again, it'd be roversimplfying things.

"So what do they test for?"

"They want to know if their research from the past fifteen years has been a giant waste of time and money. They take your data, do a little arithmetic, and try to guess what I'll do next." There's a smugness to the last bit that might suggest that they haven't been particularly successful.

"It technically means that I suffer for you, you know." And Tyler, and Elena, and Rebekah, and the rest of the builds who've endured lifetimes of simulated struggle. She may not have spent a lot of time being with them, but through the Stream they remain a part of her as much as she is a part of them, wading through their experiences like they were her own; in another time, on another plane.

Klaus picks up on her stiff reply, and reaches out for her hand, his thumb grazing over her knuckles in reassurance. "You don't have to. Not for much longer, at least."

It sounds worse than a plan. It sounds like a promise, and unfulfilled ones have always been particularly hard for her to cope with. "What do you mean?"

"I think it's time that you live your life," he smiles at her. "You'll just have to wait a bit longer for me to help you with that."

She looks at where their hands have been joined for way too long to just be a passing gesture. There's a little skip in her chest at how right it feels.

"It's not easy for me to trust you when you're all cryptic." It's meant to come off jokingly, but the frown pinching her forehead betrays her.

The fact is that she _does_ trust him - a lot more than anyone else on this godforsaken land of bad science, maybe a little too much. Because he's been in her head, in her memories, knowing every iota of fickle emotion that makes up her biosynthetic brain, and still he asks in the end, _What do you want, Caroline?_

His hold remains firm. "See if you can get away some time. I'd like to show you something."

"When?"

"On any night," he smiles. "When your admin isn't watching. You can enjoy my company in the meantime."

Sneaking off from the labs? The idea is ludicrous, but Caroline nods anyway.

She swipes the bottle by the neck, tipping it to her mouth, and finally draws her hand back from him. "Let's _date,_ " she gasps after two strong gulps, her head turning towards the animals in the distance.

Damon had offered her a place in his bed the second night she couldn't sleep. Not like that; it seemed more of a courtesy to give her a proper place to rest besides on a reclining chair, now that he'd begun to see her as Caroline. Her admin's unnatural concern was like something out of a horror movie - she'd just been waiting for the twist to hit her.

Good thing she turned him down when she did. Caroline leaves the door wedged open a sliver with one of the spare shoes he keeps in the office, carefully moving through the unwatched corridors to search for a way out; this is attempt four, and she's charted several paths to dead ends or human-dense areas, with no sign of an exit yet.

Thanks, Klaus. She doesn't know why his secret _something_ is so interesting, but it is, and she's determined to meet him outside of a scenario, _outside_ – it's serious enough for him to keep mum about it even when she's alone with him.

There's got to be a door that doesn't require a person.

Tired of moving along the perimeter without success, Caroline works her way deeper into the facility this sixth time, and ends up in a walkway bathed in red light, in a sector she's never been to. She expects more cameras to be staring her down, but there are none, and she's left with only the sound of the air conditioning and the soft pad of her feet. _It's like a deadzone,_ she frowns, the discomfort already settling in her skin.

She scans the location – the particular section she's in is completely devoid of life – but she picks up an electrical signature behind a door #845. It shouldn't open, but it does, and it looks no less different than her own humble home of a lab, except for Tyler's eyes glowing white hot in the darkness. He's seated upright, barely lighting the room. She can only make out the outline of his face.

"Hey," she dashes toward him, eyes slowly adjusting. "Hey, are you–"

Her heart starts to race when she tries to feel around for his arm and finds nothing; there's a hole in his shoulder where the ends of wires and limp strings of synthetic tissue are dangling from. But that isn't what's freaking her out – he's also _plugged in._ The wire is right there, sticking out of his chest, feeding him experiences and knowledge. Suddenly, she desperately misses the rush of data in her head.

Protocol calls for a diagnostic, but she can't push past the wall of resistance foaming up in her head, so she reaches behind his ear to wake him.

He's sluggish as he blinks to consciousness, the light behind his eyes fading to just a ring around his irises.

"Tyler?" Caroline calls, hand quick to pinch the head of the wire docked in his chest.

"W-w-wait waitwait-"

He gasps his protest, but not in time to stop her from pulling it out.

The vein-cords in his neck strain as he screams, startling her. He's curling forward, eyes squeezed shut, _what the fuck!,_ she tries to press him back, but it's like he's no longer in his body.

Frightened, she jabs the needle into his chest again, and he goes slack. Saline tears slip from the corners of his eyes, past his ears. "Please don't do that again," his voice a raspy sigh, " _Please."_

"Tyler," she says, "you're broken."

He looks down at his gaping wound, breathing harshly through his teeth. A realisation begins to dawn on his face, eyes darting around the lab. "They did this to me. They left me here. I can't leave. I can't leave the Stream."

Caroline cups his face to centre him. "Your handlers... Your admin?"

He is incredulous. "They're all gone."

"Gone?"

"Don't you get it?" he snaps, like it's all her fault, and she draws her hands away. "There are no handlers or admins. This place is done for." He covers an eye with the only hand he has left. "You have to help me. I can't live like this."

She wants more answers, but the suffering in his voice is too great to ignore. "Damon is still around. My admin, he's still around, I can go get–"

"No, don't leave, please."

"He can help you, Tyler. I _can't._ I don't have the authorization." She wouldn't even know where to start.

He cranes his neck to look around. "Find a screwdriver. Something. Shut me down, jam it into the side of my," he gestures grimly, at the spot where his boot switch lies, "and just pull it all out. Get it out of me. Get it out."

"No! We'll get you out, I promise, I just need to get–"

His proposition sends her reaching for the door. Nobody's getting _euthanized_ today. Maybe if she could get Damon, or the scientists, maybe a person who could–

"Caroline, _I'm sorry,_ for everything, _"_ Tyler nearly shouts. He's overwhelmed. She can hear it, but she doesn't have it in her to turn around.

When Damon frantically shuts her down for what she says about Tyler, she knows that her fellow build is well and truly fucked.

It's worry, black silence, and dread in her skull before she's woken again – not that she's gotten any restful sleep at all – only to be greeted by a tight slap to the face.

Another smack whips across her cheek. Caroline throws her hands up and pushes back with all her strength, shouting in protest. Sitting up, she cups the side of her face and raises her head to see Rebekah stumbling back.

"Came to get you," she says. Her hair gleams almost white in the gentle cast of the lab's standby lights. "You take way too long to boot."

Caroline twists to look back at Damon's door.

"He isn't here," her rescuer offers the same hand that struck her seconds ago. "Time to go."

Caroline doesn't take it. "Tyler, I saw him. He was hurt... he was-"

The other build grasps her by the forearm. "The engineers' parting gift to us. Now he's nothing but a pile of shredded scrap. If we don't get out right now, we're going to join him. And besides," she smiles, "I'm too pretty to be cut up like that."

"Where are we going?"

Rebekah is yanking her towards the door. "We're going to meet a friend," she replies, and drags her out.

The door seals shut behind them. No turning back.

She is led through the corridor, on a route she's previously attempted to navigate. In a few turns, they would be dangerously close to the guards standing watch, but Rebekah takes little caution as she strides down the walkways with Caroline's hand in hers.

"We're going to get caught," whispers Caroline, the soles of her feet slapping against the floor. At their pace, it's hard to stay stealthy.

"We're not," Rebekah replies. "You're the last one out. Your admin really cut you off, didn't he?" They turn the corners into uncharted territory, where the path spreads out into wider space.

No guards. "Where is everyone?" Without people, the facility is eerie, adding a tinny quality to their voices.

"Evacuated. They left everything behind. There was some sort of emergency meeting and everyone packed up and left," replies Rebekah. "I was in the middle of a scenario when it happened. Took me days to realise that they weren't coming back. Can you imagine how much of an idiot I looked like, just waiting for them?"

Caroline offers a small shrug of sympathy.

One more long walkway, and they arrive at a cargo lift, where Rebekah mashes the button impatiently. The grilles beneath them press into Caroline's feet uncomfortably, but she's too numb everywhere else to let it bother her. There's too much to process, too fast.

There's also the matter of being _this close_ to an escape if she had made it past the guards somehow. "If there isn't anyone here, I don't see why we can't take the time to get a little more familiar with the lay of the land."

"We don't have time. They're setting off an EMP soon, and I need you to not end up as a brick."

"An EMP."

"Yeah. The kind that fries seventy-five percent of your internals so that we can watch them remotely extract critical data from our dead bodies and leave us strewn around until the sun blows up the planet. Didn't say much more about it in the logs I found, but the teams wanted it done before we could give them more trouble."

The data point in her chest is only for Stream connections, so the only way she sees anyone accomplishing a remote extraction is by cracking open her skull, scooping out her entire brain, and sectioning out the parts they need.

Grim, yes, but it's not difficult to imagine Damon harvesting her key components and throwing the rest of her out like gristle trimmings. He's an engineer first; handler second. If the pulse ever hit her, she isn't counting on his kindness to pull her through.

And beyond that, then what? Does her mind travel with her admin or stay with the build carcass on the floor? Would she be pressed into disc platters and exist only in binary? Would they keep _her_ intact? Or would she just be biosynthetic tissue, fused to a new mind?

Caroline looks down at her hands, and clenches them, knuckles whitening - _I just want me. I want to keep all of me._

She pauses as the elevator doors spread wide. "So they know. That we're..." Sentient. Real. Living. Rebekah nods. "When?"

"Six months ago. Since Klaus woke up." The mention of his name would've piqued her interest immediately, but it's the first bit that confuses her.

"Six weeks, you mean," she corrects, following Rebekah into the elevator.

"Caroline," the companion stabs the G button with her finger, slightly perturbed. "You've been asleep for a while now."

The shaft echoes as they descend further into the facility. It isn't much different from what Caroline feels in her belly.


	4. Scales From Your Eyes

It seems like one big dramatic, elaborate scenario sometimes. Klaus, finding Tyler, the escape. Almost too many variables and moving pieces. Almost too outrageous to not be a simulation.

But it could be.

In her experience, meticulously planned chaos is the hallmark of any esteemed scenario architect, and this smells of someone desperately trying to orchestrate their magnum opus. Her cortisol levels are through the roof. Damon always strived for that before letting the axe fall.

And she thinks back to Bonnie, holding her hands. Telling her not to let them break her.

It's cold on the platform. They've taken almost half an hour and a winding series of connected crawlspaces and maintenance shafts to reach the small moored boat Rebekah is in. Even if Caroline had managed to creep her way to the lift, there was no way that she could've broken out of the facility by herself. Not like this.

The morning breeze catches in her hair where she stands; the motor is purring, the bay doors are thrown wide open, and Rebekah is gesturing for her to hop on.

It just seems so convenient.

"Would you rather this be your grave?" her fellow build huffs, tucking rope under her seat. She tilts her head, pensive. "Think I'd like to get a manicure before I died."

Caroline stares at her, her decision wrapped around her throat like precious pearls.

 _I just want it to be real,_ she recites in her heart, and steps in, flush with doubt.

Here's to hoping.

She thinks he looks like a mirage, sitting on the porch, rocking back on chair legs.

Her leggings are damp at the knees with saltwater as both she and Rebekah trudge up a gentle slope to a two storey house. It's not large, but it looks lived in, with peeling paint and algae lining the windowsills. The vegetation has grown wild around it; long grass hiding where cement meets the ground, vines creeping up onto the roof tiles and trees hugging the entire right face of the building's exterior, their branches pressed up against window panes.

A total antithesis of the white-bulbed, chemically stripped tech labs she's spent most of her life in.

Caroline surprises herself by smiling at Klaus as she approaches the wide steps. Despite her reservations over her Base extraction, seeing him is a bit like meeting an old friend, and a bit of having a slice of home returned to her. They're not hugging, but they might as well be.

(The WELCOME mat with the happy dog face lying at the foot of the front door helps too.)

"Hello," says Klaus, still rocking.

"Hi," she gives a little wave.

"Ugh," scoffs Rebekah, "would you at least let me bring her in first so I can tell her where my zones are?"

He ignores it. "What do you want to do?"

"Just grab a breather for a second, I guess." She doesn't know which is more disorienting - her experience since waking, or being asked for her opinion.

Rebekah takes her by the hand again, a habit that she's gotten used to by now. "You can do that inside," the impatient build asserts, and tugs her through the open door, straight into their house.

Home, she corrects. She supposes this is her home now.

There are five of them left. The realisation is painful, because there were _thirteen_ builds, grinding gears and spilling nerve fluid, crying and bleeding and getting their brains purged every single day for science, for humankind. Years were spent stewing in each other's pain and struggle in the digital soup of the Stream, amassing more than a century's worth of practical experience – read: _human_ experience, simulations or not – in the field. There were old lives in those bodies, always joined in some way, reborn each time they woke up to another cycle, another reality.

And there are just five of them left.

Klaus, of course, is the odd one out. Never been back to the facility since he left it. He offers her a glass of riesling, keen to pick up from when they last met, but she turns him down at the whiff of it, smelling notes of petrol. She literally has no taste for it anyway.

No offense taken. He nudges her, a request to scoot over so he can rest on the other end of the couch and sip to his heart's content.

"Is this what you wanted to show me?" she asks, looking around the living room, impressed with how well it's been preserved. Her feet fall onto his lap naturally – and he lets her do it, without visible signs of disdain or protest – while she relaxes into the cushions, arms folded.

Klaus remembers their conversation too. "No. You'll get to see that later."

His free hand curves over her ankle, and Caroline feels the tingle surge up her leg.

Shit, she'd never really considered the possibilities before. To really like someone and have things _progress_ , to a point when she would have to decide for herself if she wanted to _be_ with a person. How could she have known that she'd ever reach _that point_? It was always Damon's work, his planning, his executions. She hardly kissed people because she _wanted to._

 _Oh please_ , she chides inwardly. Already stressing about kissing. _You've only gone on two dates with him._

And yet she had spent all her time in the Stream listening to his consciousness since her first independent thought, baring all of her deepest feelings and memories to him until he rose up in his physical form. Does it make sense to follow the conventional rules and social structures of dating when they aren't even _human?_

Klaus sets his glass down on the coffee table, still holding her leg. "You need some stitching."

"Huh?" she blurts.

He wraps his hand more fully around her as he lifts her heel a bit higher, where she finally sees how scratched up the tops of her feet are from all the barefoot trekking she's been doing. The silicone pads of her soles are probably a tragedy on their own.

"Remind me to repair this."

She wriggles her toes, noticing the irregularities in sensation underneath. The damage isn't deep enough – her pain sensors are in her skeleton. "You have a polymer gun?"

"We did a lot of borrowing during the evacuation. Apparently, builds can drag half a tonne of supplies across _forty clicks_ on foot at an incline of _four degrees_ in under _two weeks_."

"And what did _you_ do?"

He chuckles.

Rebekah's voice bursts inside the house like thunder. "THIRTY MINUTES!"

Klaus pats Caroline on the calf. "Looks like we've got to hide in the Tin Room," he says, nodding at the stairs, then pauses to look her in the eye. "I'm glad you're here."

Her face breaks into a grin; she hasn't felt this appreciated since Bonnie gave her a hand bouquet of yellow roses for her birthday.

"I'm glad you're here too," she replies.

Not a sliver of tin in here, but she can see why they might call it that. Every inch of ceiling, wall and tile is lined with malleable silver sheets, haphazardly joined together with aluminium tape. She's seen Damon eat a pop tart, and it feels like they're stuck in the wrapper.

Rebekah seals the last gaps around the door with the last yard of her roll. Her self-proclaimed title of resource master is well-deserved; what was once a plain old room is now a makeshift faraday cage, and they won't feel a thing when the EMP strikes. It's stuffy, but the temperature won't rise fast enough to bake them while they wait for things to pass.

Caroline wants to give her kudos for it, but she's too distracted by the brain-in-a-tank on the table in front of her.

Thin red tubes run out of either side of it, joining another tank that hosts stacks of intricate metal grids. Spools of electromagnetic coils sit next to the setup – she can feel the energy rippling outwards from where she's standing.

Computer. She looks at a monitor that they've hung up the wall like a clock, counting down to what's presumably the EMP drop.

"This is the thing," she turns to Klaus, concerned. "Your thing."

"Our thing."

As in the brain suspended in water. Their thing. "Who is that?"

Enzo, crouched behind the tanks, raises his head and peers at her through the glass. "Alaric."

"Alaric?"

"Well, he volunteered. Didn't feel like he needed his body all that much and–" he looks over at Katherine, with her oxygen mask clinging tightly to her face, "–he'd have the least problematic outcome out of everyone when he's connected."

The dark-haired build fakes a sweetness in her concealed smile, then sticks her middle finger up at him. Rebekah presses a fist against her mouth to stop from laughing.

"Connected–"

"Connected to the Stream," Klaus interjects, opening his arms in introduction. "2.0. Surprise."

"We just need to hook you up," Enzo says, picking a wire up off the floor. He waves it at Klaus, the needle-end dancing about. "It'll just take a second."

Caroline hesitates. "Just like the old one."

"Better," Rebekah corrects. "We'll be in control." She refers to the timer. "Ten minutes."

"Look," Klaus takes Caroline's hand, his voice tender. "You've been trapped here all your life. They took every single fear they could think of and made you live through them over and over again, every day, with no intention to stop."

She squeezes his hand at that. The fact that the hollow aftermath of her hundred-plus scenarios remains fresh in her mind makes her sore in her worn out shell of a body.

"We shared _everything_ in that place, whether we liked it or not. But now we have a little more power over that."

"Work in progress," Enzo quips, walking over with the wire in his hand.

"Work in progress," Klaus echoes. "But at least you get to decide if you want to share what you know. It's the first step to being free."

Would she be able to tell the difference? She knows what it is to have autonomy, but she isn't sure if it's the same thing.

"And when they take the Stream down," she asks, pulling away to fold her arms in like it might shield her from the question, "Will I die?"

"We don't know what will happen," Enzo says, passing the point to Klaus. "Well, you've survived long enough without it, haven't you? Hypothetically, if you get wiped, there's no way for you to ever come back. Not as _you_ , anyway. You'll retain basic function, sure, but you'll never be the same as you are right now. Our memories are everything we've got. Our experiences shape who we are. Take that away and what do we have?"

"Nothing worth existing for, in my opinion," Katherine muffles behind her mask. "I'd rather chew on a power line."

"You still could," shrugs Enzo.

Klaus ignores them, his eyes focused on Caroline. "You don't have to do it now. But when they destroy that last server, you're very much on your own. And I would rather have you here. With me."

This is a choice, she thinks, her first one as a free woman. To choose the people she would be with, instead of merely tolerating the one engineer that she'd been born to.

It must've been easy for the rest to decide to get off the grid, but she's still swimming in hesitation when she considers leaving behind all of her old life. Leaving the labs, leaving the possibility of seeing Bonnie again. Leaving the vast libraries of the other missing builds' memories to wither up in the EMP, their perspectives of the world dying with whatever remained of their bodies. Sweeping it all away to make room for something she's still coming to terms with.

Yet the idea of being _real._

The hope blossoming in her stomach reaches her ears. It's been a long time since she's felt it so strongly - if everything is a farce, she doesn't know if the resulting crash will kill her and empty her out inside. Whoever constructed the whole scenario can crown himself King of the Architects.

But if everything is _real,_ she is _free_.

Caroline takes the wire from Klaus, and pinches the tiny silicone plug from her chest.

So much data is going through her head at once. The flow of the new Stream feels like it's searching, pouring forth like a river, like it's waiting to beat her mind-door down in anticipation.

She has yet to open it.

Caroline is awake. Her eyes are open, but she can't focus on Klaus standing in front of her.

Instead she sees through Rebekah, when they threw her into a dark room for two weeks with nothing but a paperclip and a ball of twine. _Find your way out,_ she heard, the objective hanging over her head. They locked her in; it was an impossible problem the engineers set up and almost forgot about, until a reminder about scheduled maintenance showed up in an email notification.

Caroline blinks into the memory of Katherine, listening to the demeaning remarks the everyman or woman would share while they compared her with her sister build Elena. Difficult, they kept repeating within the focus groups. Strongheaded. Bitch. Caroline feels how it cuts, but Katherine wears it like armour, treats it like ink needled into her skin. The engineers grew organs inside of her, bonding them to synthetic parts; maybe, at least on a physical level, that made her the most human out of all of them, but she would never embrace the fact. If her life hadn't depended on it, she would've had discarded all the flesh and bone the moment she escaped.

Then Alaric's consciousness draws her into an old daydream of his; he is married to his handler Isobel, and they shepherd two kids into a car to take them to school. She kisses him sweetly, on his cheek, and they hold hands just before the engine ignites. Just a daydream, he indicates voicelessly. It plays in a loop, Caroline realises, and she can't glean any of his emotions from it because he's shuttered them away. _It's a beautiful moment,_ she shares in her head, but his answer is as still and grey as the rest of him.

The remaining data that splashes through her is mostly Enzo, and the Stream is thronged with his knowledge. There are so many pieces of him hitting her; schematics and his dissertation and academia, girlfriends and memorized guitar tabs and reserves of movie quotes. Her eyebrow twitches at a glimpse of Caroline's administrator –former?– kissing him, a casual meet of the lips after a lazy mention of a one-time thing, but it's distant, like an echo.

It must be terrible to be the replica of someone else. Straddling the line between creator and creation.

She sees the muscles in his forearms slit with shadows of stress from scaling boulders and rock faces in the South African Rocklands. The Enzo build knows how it feels to make it to the top of the _Caroline_ route, with chalk dust stuck under his fingernails and Damon standing by the crashpad as his spotter. He remembers fondly, as his maker often did, the ugly chortle he let out many months later when he'd gotten a hold of an architect booklet to find the very ode to their trip immortalized in a brand new programme.

He remembers it as a little note of love. It runs through her too, the whisper of it, a fondness for her own maker she quickly rejects with a cough, forcing her back into the roaring crush of data.

Caroline's hand reaches for the bony curves of Klaus' knuckles. "And where are you?"

His reply breaks up past her ears, melting into a sizzle of interference. It's in little shards, prickling all over her body, his every emotion cast over her like a storm of dust and sand. Some of them she knows, the envy and anger and stubborn determination, some of it she doesn't recognize or understand, but it begins to swirl into something thick, feelings going over her like a crash of a wave.

It's difficult to see anything in those memories. It's like gutted sucked down the vortex of a whirlpool, her heart beating and brain parsing, _how can someone feel this deeply and so much at once_ ; Caroline continues sinking and taking it in, swallowing and choking. Is she drowning or breathing?

Clip.

The world around her is suddenly clear again, with everyone in the room staring at her like she's grown two heads. Klaus is holding the wirehead in his hand, and the clock says there are three minutes to go before their universe is altered again.

She draws her hand back and collapses.


End file.
